Mark Blyth - Global Trumpism

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This guy's caught some fire recently, partly on just how observant he's been on what's happening with the empowerment of the strange part of the right both in here and Europe. This is a speech he gave in late September for last year:

To extrapolate a little for anyone who can't watch from where they're at he's essentially saying this:

- After WWII there was a push to create full employment. That initiative resulted in a period of inflation where employers adjusted cost of goods upward because they didn't have the ability to sell more of their goods either at home or abroad and yet they were shouldering both wages (ie. union-driven) and employee counts that had to translate out into the end product. The result was that debtors made out well, creditors fared poorly.

- Somewhere in the late 70's or early 80's there was a pushback from the creditors which aimed for deregulation of financial institutions, knock-down of international borders for business, and this was done in the name of beating inflation. This did significantly slow inflation, it also sent many production jobs overseas with the argument that the goods would be less expensive, this left many people in the US both highly qualified and underemployed if not outright unemployed.

- The people of the US and many countries in Europe feel like their politicians are in bed with the banking and finance so much so that their voices aren't heard, they're struggling to make it financially and with each passing politician they've gotten a lot of promises but no help. In turn they're turning to both the extreme right and left for something different - ie. something that isn't sleek, polished, and useless the way a lot of the politicians they've been dealing with have been.

- The Eurozone has had much of its troubles due to the involved countries not being able to adjust their currencies, north countries have outsourced to eastern Europe while the southern countries have been more in the consumer range of activity, have had to shoulder deficits for northern Europe's surpluses which created significant economic problems for southern Europe to the point that the National Front looks like it could possibly take the next election in France and Five Star has already made signficant progress in Italy.

- For the nationalistic ideas to prevail, ie. drawing economies back within economic borders and raising tariffs won't help because there's another significant problem in the mix - technology is probably an even larger driver of unemployment than offshoring. These jobs literally can't come back and if they do they'll be almost fully mechanized.


He seems to suggest that the 1930's and 40's of Europe can't come back, ie. history can't repeat itself verbatim, but that we're heading into unknown territory. My guess, as a synthesis of what he's saying, is that there needs to be some kind of middle-road between the two economic extremes of the last 60 years and we probably want to have some sort of evening factor, like low-level tarrifs of some kind that act to at least stem some of the bleeding.

As for permanent technological job loss - I've really been thinking for the past year or so that an increasing living wage supplement will be needed - ie. something that starts out under $10,000 per person that gives them the ability to at least have food, shelter, and be able to pay bills if they work at McDonald's and then have that supplement rolled back progressively across an income gradient up to a certain metric that can be considered a relatively worry-free zone (you'd have to calculate something like that on size of household). That supplement would slowly increase as opportunities for employment technologically decreased and eventually what you'd have is something close to a universal living wage but it would be something where people who wanted to make more than that wage could have the opportunity to do so by applying themselves in STEM, the arts, teaching, medicine, etc.. I really don't think universal living wage will be avoidable if technology is going to make the labor market obsolete as a distributor of value, just that we'd need to make sure there is an incentive structure in that system sufficient to keep society operational and flexible.

This is so worth watching.

Thanks for posting. The talk was excellent and the Q&A just as good.

He certainly made a convincing economic case that the European unification project is doomed.

A very insightful exploration of Trump in the US and trump like figures on the left and right across Europe.